Wiki:Guide on fanons
What is this page?
As the writer of this page, Sinclair-Speccy, something that annoyed me about OS-tans when I first discovered them was the fact they had a canon. While one OS-tan canon is generally accepted because of another place that is much larger than here that has been around for longer there were some problems with it.
The main problem was glurge. Some of the character's backstories seem like that in hindsight. But what is glurge? A way to explain glurge is it is part of stories that seem heartwarming but have creepy elements when you think about it. Let's take one example that was pointed out to me. A character who was said to be around 5 years old was abandoned as a small child and reconciled with her mother as if nothing happened in one OS-tan canon. It would've been realistic for that child character to not want to reconcile with their mother but canon had it happen this way.
The second problem was "bloating a character's page with 'fan fictiony' stuff". While this point was valid, it has issues. Everyone has their own interpretation of a character such as I do with 95-tan. This wiki does hold some pages for canon characters and these are indicated by the large banners (soon to come) on the top of their pages and in their infobox. But people would want to compete for their ideas to be the main idea and this could cause arguments, hence what this place tries to avoid by allowing people to create their own pages and their own fanon of their ideas.
And the last problem was having a superior bloodline in the canon. One could argue that this applies to more than one fandom which is true, but there are bad implications with having a superior bloodline. There were creepy implications about the UNIXes being a "superior bloodline" that was trying to take over the world. The bad implications? Eugenics. What is eugenics? Eugenics are a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population but it is also the immoral theory of “racial improvement”. Marginalization of neurodivergent and disabled people, forced sterilization, state-sponsored killings... it was one of those things that just wasn't thought through. I don't like the idea of any bloodline being seen as more special than others, but with the real-world context of how neurodivergent and disabled people have been treated throughout history and even now, it's worse.
The other wiki is treated as the wiki as it seems to be the 3rd result for OS-tans on duckduckgo, bing and Yahoo, and number two on Google and Ask. That means that wiki can be seen as the superior wiki, despite it not being updated since 2022. 2022 wasn't that long ago (at the time of writing this it was 3 months ago) but as time goes on replacements need to be made to help keep information updated and the last proper update was perhpas from 2019. You can argue that other sites that are older than this wiki are reliable which is true but think of it like the history of technology. New technology was made to replace older withering outdated technology. For me personally, I don't count minor fixes as huge updates.
The aim of this page is to guide users on how to make a fanon and explain terms and such. It is not meant to be seen as a competitor. A fanon isn't required to be part of the OS-tan fandom but it is nice to have one.
What counts as OS-tan canon?
For what counts as canon, I say there are two canons; the Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel where ME-tan, XP-tan and 2K-tan originated from and the Annex Project.
The Annex Project from the older wiki tends to build upon what Futaba had started. Although it states Annex is not official, it is what most people encounter when looking up OS-tans and therefore can be presumed to be "canon". It is an expanded universe that strives to integrate new OS-tan characters and backstories with those of other OS-tan artists while remaining faithful to Futaba's original OS-tan canon and the work of other artists, but it is now mostly out of date due to new OSes being released (Windows 11, macOS Catalina, etc).
What counts as OS-tan fanon
Fanon can be described as "fan canon." Basically, fans or a singular fan developing something fanmade for a fanon. A OS-tan fanon can be silly or serious and a few can be found on the fanons page.
So, where do I start?
The guides listed here are merely meant to be used as a reference users can use if they do not know where to start with making their own fanon: